Dictionaries
La Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto (English: The Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto, abbreviated PIV) is the largest monolingual dictionary of the language and is generally regarded as the standard. However, it is subject to criticism, for example for failure to distinguish rare, idiosyncratic, redundant, or even erroneous words attested in a few written texts from their conversational equivalents, and for giving French approximations of some difficult words rather than their Zamehofian meanings. The older Plena Vortaro de Esperanto, originally published in 1930 and appennded in 1953, is still widely used, as more portable and less expensive than the PIV, and perhaps more accurate, even if somewhat dated. The Etimologia vortaro de Esperanto (five volumes, 1989–2001) gives source-language etymologies of all fundamental and official root words (tentative and uncertain in a few cases), along with comparisons of equivalent words in four other constructed international auxiliary languages.
Read more about this topic: Esperanto Vocabulary
Famous quotes containing the word dictionaries:
“You evidently do not suffer from “quotation-hunger” as I do! I get all the dictionaries of quotations I can meet with, as I always want to know where a quotation comes from.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)